Shannon Clarke, Final Year Project

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So this is the very first screen of the app. Karens voice and for every single page of the app is set to play. If the user wishes to play the audio again, they simply touch the text area and the scene will reset.

When this scene starts Oisin’s eyes are set to blink after one second. After this then the user can tap his eyes and he will blink. His nose and ears are also interactive.

The image sequence bellow that you can see of the eye blink was created with 3 images (illustrator).

Bellow is the second page. The princess on the horse bounces in from the left and stops at the position in the screenshot bellow. On this scene the trees play a scale with each one you tap the scale rises. The black hole in the tree is where the owl eyes appear. Some of the mushrooms are interactive.

So this is the third screen. There is three auto playing animations here, her pony tale which waves, the crown which rises and wobbles and the spirals on her dress which appear. The user can also play these through interaction. Some audio interactions will be added to the background.

This is the fourth screen. This is a camera zoom into the princess face. It begins further out. Her head tilts down.

The scene then auto changes to this because the above image was an animation I made in after effects. So in order to make them interactive I had to then add them in separately.

A few changes to be made: Two main characters will be here and the play button will be changed to say begin/start…

When the user hits the play button, the clouds open and the camera zooms into the island.

At this point the main menu appears: Read to me, Read myself and page select.

Im not really sure if I will be able to do the Read myself section, If I figure out a way that would be great as I think it would be nice to have.

The read myself section requires some sort of code to say not play Karens voice in every scene when Read myself is clicked. As of right now I have no idea how I will go about this but for now my focus is getting the app put together first.

Okay so its been a few days since I blogged however my reasoning is I’m not really sure how to go about this. I’m still learning things as I go along with lots of trial and errors.

Last week I had created two screens in the app however it was highlighted at the supervisor meeting that it was a bit boring and I need to think about if this were say a video etc having close up and the likes.

So I had to start over. This I know the best thing to do, it sort of killed my motivation and actually forced me to tears one day with Ian when he asked how my project was going (sorry Ian). Then to make it worse I was sick over the bank holiday. Icing on the cake!.

I was beginning to panic at the start of this week. Trying to finish the last two assignments and get some fyp work in. My progress was slow last week hence the lack of blogging. But I guess I could say is I’m back guys yay……..

So with a week left to the deadline the pressure is very high. Spent my Saturday morning in college got some good work done there so I’m feeling good. Its amazing how much easier it is to work in there when its quiet.

I’m going to blog whatever I have from last week. I just genuinely feel that its hard to document.

Today I presented to Dan what I had got. He suggested a change that I could make if I have time in the end. The change was to the paper of the text boxbox and to make it look more worn.

Considering the amounof time I’ve got left and the amount of work I need to do it was advised that I make up a detailed plan of what needs to get done in a give time frame. Dan further advised that I take about six or seven scenes and make them look really good animation wise. I think this is the right thing to do as well it would be putting my 3D models down.

Tomorrow I will plan out my life for the next week and hope for the best.

With regards getting the app on the android store it is still unsure. I simply cannot afford the 200 euros for a pro game salad account however Dan is looking to have the college pay for this. Then other students can use the account too which is a good thing for future students as well.

Okay so putting the app together is proving to be a long process of constant learning. However I do think when I learn and get this first scene in place the others will not be as challenging because Ill be using the same kind of stuff.

One thing im not sure about is the background music. I would like to have that for each ‘location’ there is a backing track to represent the place etc like birds chirping in the forest, the sea at the cliff scene. However Im not sure how to do this.

I figured out a way to let it play on as I go from scene to scene and only restarting when I return to the first scene with the birds sound. But the problem is how to make it stop after so many scenes.

Another problem im facing is that of the pause button. I can get the pause button to stop the background music. However I cant get it to play it again. Its things like this that is getting highly frustrating, there is probably a simple solution to this that I have yet to find. Ill probably (HOPE) that I find it some day soon. As for now I am aiming to get everything in as well the end is near!!.

Im also finding it hard to blog they process of bringing my app together visually, not really sure what to be putting up. Now that im bringing audio into the first scene, I cant capture this on a screen grab….

So heres screen shots of what I can capture, this is how the scene opens:

Interactivity includes (from top left) Tree top spin, owl eyes blink, mushroom (1) just sound, mushroom 2 (wobble) mushroom 3 (scale), bottom tree trunk fox appears and disappears, Each tree has a sound when tapped from left to right they go down in scale as do all items listed above.

** Character Fionn has to be added to screen **
He is yet to be updated. I plan to do this tomorrow.

Then the princess enters from the left as the voice over says “A woman appear before them riding a snow white horse”:

I would like that the child taps the horse and neighs etc, might try find out a way of getting this to work.

At this point I then change screen to a more close up of the princess as the voice over begins to describe her:

The plan here is when the voice over says “On her head she wore a beautiful crown” The crown will fall onto her head with some sort of magical sound.

So far one thing I have found very frustrating about game salad is the constant freezing. The software is rather slow and takes long to respond to previewing the app or adding files. I find myself staring at the dreaded rainbow spinning wheel for long periods, sometimes resulting in quitting gamesalad and returning to my previous saved position.

The plan for the text box as I cant seem to find anything on this is to using after effects, create the scrolling effect and highlighting words. This is the only way I can think of getting this. Gamesalad doesnt allow you to use your own fonts. Because the font I am using is a font that was chosen due the a being how we write an a, and not your typical font a like this very one, I need to use a not Gamesalad font. Because I dont have after effects on my laptop I have to work on this in college.

Following my problems with the Gamesalad viewer I decided to try the APK method. I did this by hitting publish button on the gamesalad creator.

Firstly because Im not paying for gamesalad I cant publish the app for android meaning I cant test the app on android so I need to get an iPad somehow.

This is the general form that has to be filled in. Im not too sure what to do with the aspect ratio but for now I choose the letterbox method. I also now know that I need to create a loading page for my app and the dimensions.